1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a cold rolling mill lubricant for steel sheets or plates and, more particularly, to a cold rolling mill lubricant having excellent lubricating and mill clean performance.
2. Description of the prior Art
Cold rolling mill lubricants used in cold rolling steel sheets or plates are roughly grouped into those containing, as a base oil, animal or plant oils having the triglyceride structure (e.g., beef tallow, hog fat, palm oil, or coconut oil) and into those containing mineral oils as a base oil. With recent trends of conservation in natural and artificial resources and improvements in productivity, high rolling reduction rolling and high-speed rolling are more frequently performed. Lubricants are therefore required of increasingly high performance such as mill clean performance (i.e., when the lubricant becomes attached to a steel sheet and the steel sheet is annealed without removing it, the thermal decomposition product of the lubricant does not remain on the sheet and the lubricant does not therefore contaminate the sheet surface).
Animal or plant oil-based lubricants can be conveniently used for high rolling reduction rolling or high-speed rolling. However, if the oil content remaining on a cold rolled steel sheet is left unremoved and the sheet is annealed, the sheet surface is contaminated with the residue of the lubricant. In other words, although oils having the triglyceride structure have excellent lubrication performance, they have poor mill clean performance.
Mineral oil-based lubricants have excellent mill clean performance but cannot provide satisfactory lubrication performance in high rolling reduction rolling or high-speed rolling. In order to improve the lubrication performance of mineral oil-based lubricants, oiliness improvers such as animal or plant oils or fatty acids (e.g., caprylic acid, lauric acid, myristic acid, stearic acid, oleic acid, or linolic acid), or esters (e.g., monoester, diester or polyolester containing trimethylol propane, pentaerythrythol, 2-ethylhexyl alcohol as an alcohol component) as described in Yukagaku, Vol. 11, pp. 695 to 706 (1973). However, the addition content of such an oiliness improver must be adjusted to fall within a narrow range, and upon such difficult control satisfactory results are not still obtained.
Although proposals have been made in order to provide cold rolling mill lubricants having excellent lubrication and mill clean performance as per Japanese Patent Disclosure Nos. 56-135600 or 59-80498, satisfactory results have not been obtained so far.